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| “ | You don't seem to understand that witches are not actually women at all. They look like women. They talk like women. And they are able to act like women. But in actual fact, they are totally different animals. They are demons in human shape. That is why they have claws and bald heads and queer noses and peculiar eyes, all of which they have to conceal as best they can from the rest of the world. | „ |
| ~ The boy's grandmother about the witches. |
The Witches are the main antagonists in the 1983 Roald Dahl novel The Witches, and it's movie adaptations. They are actually female demons who have come to Earth, and for thousands of years, they have made it their duty to rid the world of children, which they loathe due to children smelling like "dog's droppings" to them.
The portrayal of witches were considerably dark for a children's book, as they were all guilty of casting harmful spells of children, which included trapping them inside a painting or polymorphing them into animals, especially the ones that their parents hated. American Witches are said to turn children into hot-dogs that their parents consume without even knowing that. They would usually go after a child once per week.
They are led by the Grand High Witch of All the World, who the rest of the witches are terrified of. Unlike the other witches, she did not limit herself to more than one child per week. In fact, she came up with a plan that would ultimately murder all of the children in England.
All of the witches on England were killed off (with the exception of Susan Irvine in the 1990 film only) after the boy and his grandmother used their own formula against them, by contaminating it into their soup at dinner, turning them all into mice, and then being subsequently slaughtered by the confused hotel staff, believing them all to be real mice.
Appearance[]
All of the witches have the same appearance. They are bald, have clawy fingers and toeless, square feet. In order to avoid any suspicions among humans, they wear wigs, which give them horrible rash, gloves to hide their claws, and elegant pumps or flat shoes. They also have colour-changing irises and their pupils have flames in them, blue saliva which they use as ink, and enlarged nostrils to help them localize the child.
In the 1990 film adaption, it was shown that when a witch renounces evil and uses her magic for good deeds, she loses her monstrous features and becomes a normal looking female. Her claws become ordinary fingers and she grows real hair. This was shown with Susan Irvine when she decided to become a good witch and turn Luke and Bruno back to humans.
In the 2020 film adaptation, the appearance of witches remains the same as they are still bald and have toeless, square feet. However, they now have three clawy fingers instead of five and they have elongated mouths showing sharpened teeth that resemble fangs and their tongues can split in two parts.
Nature[]
| “ | One child a week is 52 a year. Squish them and squiggle them and make them disappear. | „ |
| ~ The secret motto of all Witches. |
While posing as humans perfectly well, the witches retain some predatory and animalistic features, which comes from their nature as demons. They pretend to be highly civilized, respectful, and good-natured women when they are actually (bluntly put) raging psychopaths. The Witches love killing, torturing, and spreading chaos, and yet they pretend to do this in an extremely sophisticated and intelligent manner as possible to avoid being suspected of anything. All Witches cannot stand the smell of a child, especially a clean child, as dirty children have no smell for a Witch. On a pitch-black night, a Witch could smell a clean child (smelling to her of dogs droppings) from the other side of the street.
Witches are demons, and thus they have a demonic set of powers and a demonic hatred of humanity. Thus their magic may come from Satan himself. Helga suggests this at one point by saying "Nobody has seen the Devil, but we all know he exists, don't we?". All Witches originally come from Norway, and thus spread everywhere. There is a secret society of witches in every country, and they do not know each other. For instance, an English witch will know all other English witches, and so on. It is illegal for witches to communicate with foreign witches.
Despite their chaotic and boisterous nature, witches do have a hierarchy, with the Grand High Witches being at the peak. Then the chain goes to the leader of the witches from one country such as Nicola Cuttle, and so on down the chain to subordinates and so on. All other witches are terrified of the superiors, and it seems that the higher a witch is, the more advanced her powers are, as seen when the Grand High Witch burns an unlucky witch alive with eye lasers as the punishment when she dared to question her orders.
The Witches are very conniving and manipulative, fooling human authorities to believing they are respectable women. Also, all Witches are female. Dahl says he is not being sexist here, but it is just a fact of life, that all witches are women, and there is no such thing as a male witch, and to explain this, he says that barghests, another demonic species, are always male, just as witches are always female. However, neither of them are really humans anyway.
Victims[]
There have been seven known victims of Witches in the novel.
- An eight-year-old girl named Ranghild Hansen was playing with her little sister on the lawn. Suddenly, a tall lady in white gloves simply took her away. When their mother, who was baking bread, checked on them, her sister told her what happened. No one ever saw Ranghild again, but it is unknown what truly happened to here.
- Solveg Christiansen lived with her family on Holmenkollen, a mountain is Oslo, Norway. They had an old oil-painting in the living room which they were very proud of, it showed some in the grassy yard outside a farmhouse. One day, Solveg came home from school eating an apple, the next morning she was missing and her father found what looked like her painted into the painting! The following days, Solveg changed her position and got older until she disappeared entirely.
- Birgit Svenson used to lived across the road from the main protagonist and his grandmother. One day, she started growing feathers all over her body and she turned into a large white chicken in a month. Her parents kept her for years in a pen in the garden. One the bright side, she laid big, brown eggs and her mother made delicious omelets.
- A boy named Harald got turned to stone. It was slow, one morning his skin went greyish-yellow, then it became hard and crackly, the process wasn't finished until night time. His parents decided to keep him in their house, visitors lean umbrellas against him.
- A nine-year-old boy named Leif was on a summer holiday with his family on the fjord, they were picnicking and swimming off some rocks on one of the little islands. However, Leif then dived into the water and his father noticed that he stayed under for a long time. When he came to the surface at last, he wasn't Leif found to have turned into a porpoise. Leif stayed with his family all afternoon, giving his siblings rides on his back, it was actually wonderful. Then he waved one flipper at them and swam away, never to be seen again.
Trivia[]
- Witches sometimes are referred as "Hekser" in the Norwegian language.
